"The field of Communication Studies has greatly contributed to analyzing and theorizing about discourses surrounding the legality and performance of same-sex marriage. In a Text and Performance Quarterly article, “‘It’s Not a Wedding, It’s a Gayla’: Queer Resistance and Normative Recuperation,” Dustin Goltz and Jason Zingsheim (2010) describe their attempt to create a non-heteronormative and non-homonormative celebration of their love through a “Gayla” and how this effort was continually recuperated and read as a “gay wedding.”

"Goltz and Zingsheim use critical communication and performance theory to make sense of an approach to marriage equality that “simultaneously marks gay exclusion from legal, economic, and social equity, and enacts a broader interrogation of heteronormative systems of relation for their patriarchal, classist, and homophobic functions” (p. 292). This scholarship offers a rich and nuanced understanding of the complexity of, and stakes involved in, communicating and performing “queer.”

This is just one example of the important work being researched and created by the faculty of the College of Communication since we became a college in 2007. Please join us in congratulating Dusty on the citation.